As the open social web grows, a new nonprofit looks to expand the 'fediverse'

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Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

A new project launching today aims to capitalize on the momentum seen within the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which describes interconnected social networking services powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Co-founded by the co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou, a new nonprofit organization called the Social Web Foundation will focus on expanding the fediverse, improving ActivityPub and the user experience, informing policymakers, and educating people about the fediverse and how they can participate.

Explains Prodromou, the group felt the time was right for such an effort, given that Meta recently adopted ActivityPub for its latest app, Threads, an X competitor built by Meta’s Instagram team. Thanks to the tech giant’s involvement, there are now over 200 million new potential fediverse users, dwarfing the adoption of other popular federated apps, like Mastodon, which today claims around 7.49 million registered users and under a million monthly actives.

“The fact that Threads has joined the space has made it really interesting for other companies,” Prodromou says. “Threads is bringing a really big audience, as well as big names — like @POTUS is on the fediverse … So that makes this process a lot more interesting for other organizations — both for publishers who want to reach those audiences, as well as for existing social networks who want to have those influencers and celebrities available to their users.”

The Social Web Foundation (SWF) has some backing from Meta as well, alongside other major implementors of the ActivityPub protocol, including the social magazine app Flipboard, newsletter platform Ghost, Mastodon, and others. The Ford Foundation has also offered the organization a large grant to get the project started. In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support.

Part of the group’s efforts will be focused on making the fediverse more user-friendly. Though Mastodon offers a service that functions much like Twitter/X, its decentralized nature — meaning there are multiple servers to choose from — makes getting started confusing and difficult for less technical users. Then, much like X, there’s the cold start problem of finding interesting people to follow.

SWF wants to improve on that process by offering an alternative onboarding experience, as a stand-alone product, that will help guide users through the initial steps.

It also aims to inform users about the different federated apps that are available, as many users may already be close to participating or active in the fediverse without knowing it. That’s especially true for many of those on Threads, where turning on federation for an account is an option they don’t know exists.

While the project doesn’t focus on social networking startup Bluesky, which uses its own AT Protocol, those users can also be connected to the fediverse through bridges that are now being built, which allow users from the different platforms to communicate.

In addition, SWF aims to better support services joining the fediverse, like Ghost, which allows for long-form text, as opposed to something short, more equivalent to a tweet. While the protocol currently allows for long-form text without a character count limit, other considerations come into play, Prodromou says.

“Things like, what’s a good number of attachments to include with long-form text? Or, how do you embed images? Should you have multiple sizes or not?” he says. “Those are the kinds of things that aren’t specific, formally, to the protocol, but they help build out the real usage.”

Another major focus area for the nonprofit will be on user education — and not just individuals setting up their accounts for the first time, but also those in specific industries or organizations, who have a different set of needs. For instance, SWF will initially focus on guiding media organizations on how to participate in the fediverse and why, offering case studies from others who led the way, like ProPublica, NPR, and the BBC.

Following this effort, SWF will launch similar materials for other institutions like universities, startups, and large enterprises.

With regard to startups, SWF is open to connecting with various accelerators and programs, so that those entrepreneurs building new social apps have information about why they should consider federation (connecting to the fediverse).

Prodromou estimates SWF will launch a new set of materials for the different groups at a rate of about one per quarter.

In addition to Prodromou, who will act as research director, the Social Web Foundation is co-founded by executive director Mallory Knodel, previously CTO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, and product director Tom Coates, previously of the BBC and (TC parent company) Yahoo, among others. Coates had also worked on a distributed social networking startup Planetary, built on a different protocol.

Meta and moderators agree in Kenya to mediation

Court rules in favor of a web scraper, Bright Data, which Meta had used and then sued

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Meta and moderators agree in Kenya to mediation

Image Credits: Chesnot / Getty Images

Meta has lost a claim in its legal battle with an Israeli tech firm Bright Data, which it sued last year for scraping data from Facebook and Instagram via the web. The tech giant, which has a long history of suing data scraping businesses, claimed that Bright Data’s data harvesting was a violation of its terms of service — which Bright Data had agreed to by having accounts on Meta’s platforms. However, a court has ruled in favor of Bright Data on Meta’s “breach of contract” claim, saying that Meta had not presented sufficient evidence that the firm had scraped anything but public data.

The lawsuit was particularly interesting because it revealed that Meta had earlier paid Bright Data to gather data from e-commerce websites to build brand profiles on its platforms. In other words, Meta was a customer of Bright Data’s web-scraping services before it went to sue them, though it used the company’s services for a different purpose. In a related matter, Bright Data had also been accused of collecting personal information about minors pulled from Facebook and Instagram, Bloomberg reported last year.

The court said it denied Meta’s motion for a partial summary judgment on the breach of contract claim because the company had not presented enough evidence that Bright Data scraped non-public data — meaning data that’s not behind a log-in screen or that’s password-protected. Instead, what Meta brought to the court was an example of a dataset Bright Data offered for sale, which included 615 million records of Instagram user data. The dataset sells for $860,000. Meta claimed Bright Data had been collecting and selling “vast” amounts of user data like this dataset, which had included fields like Instagram users’ names, ID, country, post count, bio, hashtags, followers, posts, profile images, business category, email, and more. However, Meta failed to establish that such data could be collected only if Bright Data had been logged into a user account.

In another example of Bright Data’s activity, Meta attempted to show that the firm was in possession of non-public information, but the court decided this didn’t prove logged-in scraping as the data could have been publicly accessible at an earlier time — like before a user changed their privacy settings, for example.

In addition, Meta argued that Bright Data had used tools to circumvent its access restrictions like CAPTCHAs, which proved Bright Data collected data “behind authentication barriers.”

The court disagreed with this, too, saying that using an automated program to bypass a CAPTCHA “is different from accessing a password-protected website” and that “Meta surely understands the difference.”

Even though Meta’s anti-scraping investigation team found that Bright Data had advertised a “scraping browser” that would automate logging into a website and simulating other user action to facilitate automated data collection, the court said this, too, wasn’t sufficient evidence that Bright Data had conducted logged-in scraping in this case.

The court also ruled that both the Facebook and Instagram terms had to be considered separately, and that there was no evidence that Bright Data had used its own Facebook and Instagram accounts when it engaged in data scraping. That means Bright Data was not acting as a “user” of the services at the time it was scraping, but only as a logged-out “visitor.” The court also didn’t find other legal arguments Meta had used convincing enough to rule in its favor on breach of contract.

“We look forward to continuing our efforts to protect user data and are evaluating next steps in the ongoing litigation,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch in light of the ruling.

The tech giant has regularly sued companies that engage in data-scraping operations in an effort to discourage the practice. In October 2022, it settled a case against two other firms, Israeli-based BrandTotal Ltd. and Delaware-incorporated Unimania Inc., which both agreed to a permanent injunction that banned them from scraping Facebook and Instagram data going forward and pay Meta a “significant financial sum,” Meta had said.

The company had also settled in 2020 with the scraping service Massroot8 and in 2022, it sued a clone site operator and a company called Octopus, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese national high-tech enterprise that had offered scraping services. Meta won that case, as the court issued a permanent injunction to stop the firm’s data-scraping operations. Last year, Meta sued another scraping-for-hire firm Voyager Labs, which has not yet been decided or settled.

Such data-scraping operations can put user privacy at risk as data collected by web scrapers has been previously leaked online, such as in the case where the personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts was found to have been leaked.

The current case with Bright Data is case No. is 3:23-cv-00077-EMC in the U.S. District Court in Northern California.

The only remaining claim against Bright Data in this case is for tortious interference with contract.

Bright Data shared the following comment from CEO Or Lenchner (emphasis theirs):

When Meta approached us with a demand to stop allowing our customers to collect public data (scraping) from Facebook and Instagram, we decided that the right thing to do was to refuse and resolve this in court because public data should remain public. Despite many efforts by tech giants to exclusively control public information on the internet, common sense prevailed. Public information is public. This has always been our claim, and we are very happy about the decision of the court that supports this approach. Bright Data, as the leading web data collection company, will continue to fight for the basic right to free access to public information on the web.

Updated, 1/24/24, 11:22 a.m. ET with Meta comment, 4:39 p.m. ET with Bright Data comment. 

Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

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Image Credits: Apple

Well, it turns out it’s not a bug that broke iPhone web apps, also known as progressive web apps (PWAs), in the EU. Following developer complaints and press reports about how PWAs were no longer functional in the EU after installing the most recent iOS betas, Apple has updated its website to explain why. No surprise, the tech giant is blaming the new EU regulation, the Digital Markets Act, for the change, saying that the complexities involved with the DMA’s requirement to allow different browser engines is the root cause.

To catch you up, security researcher Tommy Mysk and Open Web Advocacy first noticed that PWAs had been demoted to website shortcuts with the release of the second beta of iOS 17.4. Initially, it was unclear if this was a beta bug — stranger things have happened — or if it was intended to undermine the functionality of PWAs in the EU, a market where Apple is now being forced to allow alternative app stores, third-party payments, and alternative browser engines, among other things. In the betas, PWAs, which typically allow web apps to function and feel more like native iOS apps, were no longer working. Developers noticed that these web apps would open like a bookmark saved to your Home Screen instead.

As MacRumors pointed out at the time, that meant no “dedicated windowing, notifications, or long-term local storage”; iOS16.4 also allowed PWAs to badge their icons with notifications, as native apps could. Beta users of iOS 17.4 reported that when they opened a web app while running the iOS beta, the system would ask them if they wanted to open the app in Safari or cancel. The message indicates that the web app will “open in your default browser from now on,” it said. Afterward, users said they experienced issues with data loss, as a Safari website shortcut doesn’t offer local storage. Notifications also no longer worked.

Still, there was reason to be cautious about whether or not the change was intentional. Multiple staff at TechCrunch repeatedly asked Apple for comment but received no reply. (We had wanted to know if the company would confirm if this was a beta bug or an intentional change, and if the latter, what Apple’s reasoning for it was.) After the next beta release emerged, The Verge ran a report indicating that Apple “appears to be“ breaking PWAs in the EU, after also not likely getting a formal response from the tech giant.

Now Apple has responded, in its way. Today, it updated its website detailing its DMA-related changes in the EU to address the matter. In a new update, the company explains how it’s had to make so many changes to the iOS to comply with the EU guidelines that continued support for PWAs was simply off the table.

Traditionally, the iOS system provided support for Home Screen web apps by building directly on WebKit (Safari’s browser engine) and its security architecture, Apple said. That allowed web apps to align with the same security and privacy models as found in other native apps. But with the DMA, Apple is being forced to allow alternative browser engines. It argues that without the isolation and enforcement of the rules applied to WebKit-based web apps, malicious apps could be installed that could do things like read data from other web apps or “gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location without a user’s consent,” Apple said.

“Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU,” the website reads.

The company informs EU users they will be able to access websites from their Home Screen through bookmarks as a result of the change, confirming developers’ concerns that PWAs were effectively being disabled in the EU.

“We expect this change to affect a small number of users. Still, we regret any impact this change — that was made as part of the work to comply with the DMA — may have on developers of Home Screen web apps and our users,” Apple says.

Critics have argued that Apple’s desire to hold on to its power in the iOS app ecosystem was so strong that it would break web app functionality for users of its devices. Apple’s defenders, meanwhile, will probably argue that the company’s explanation is reasonable and aligns with Apple’s desire to keep iOS safe for its users. The truth, as it often does, likely lies more in the middle.

Apple still has not responded to requests for comment.

Epic Games Inc. CEO Tim Sweeney

Epic Games CEO suggests Apple broke iPhone web apps in the EU for anticompetitive reasons

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Epic Games Inc. CEO Tim Sweeney

Image Credits: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg / Getty Images

After Apple confirmed yesterday it’s breaking web apps for customers in the EU due to its compliance with the EU regulation the Digital Markets Act (DMA), Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney suggests in a post on X there’s another reason behind Apple’s decision: iPhone web apps don’t make Apple money. Sweeney, whose company sued Apple over antitrust concerns related to App Store fees, is obviously a biased source on the matter, but he raises a question that’s on everyone’s minds. Did Apple break iPhone web apps because it was looking to protect customers from security risks arising from third-party browser engines, as it claims, or was the decision more about quashing a potential threat to Apple’s business?

Would Apple really go so far as to degrade the consumer experience on iPhone to protect its revenue, in other words?

The iPhone maker on Thursday published an update to its website detailing its DMA-related changes in the EU to address the matter, after the discovery that iPhone web apps — also known as progressive web apps, or PWAs — were no longer functional in the recent iOS betas in the EU. Initially, there was concern that the issues were just a beta bug, but Apple soon put that theory to rest.

On its website, Apple explains that to comply with the DMA, it’s being forced to support other web browser engines besides WebKit — the browser engine used by Safari. iOS Home Screen web apps have relied on WebKit and its security architecture to keep users safe from online threats. This involves the isolation of storage and the enforcement of “system prompts to access privacy-impacting capabilities,” Apple said.

Without this isolation and enforcement, malicious web apps could read data from other apps and gain access to a user’s camera, microphone or location with user consent, the company noted. Since Apple is being forced to allow alternative browser engines via the DMA’s requirements, the company chose not to put users at risk and instead degraded the web app experience on iOS for users in the EU. Now, web apps will function as website bookmarks — without support for local storage, badges, notifications and dedicated windowing.

Though Sweeney arguably has a bone to pick with Apple, there may be some truth to his claims. Within Apple’s explanation of why it has ended support for web apps in the EU, the company admits there’s a technical solution to the security issues problem — but it simply chose not to implement it.

Apple wrote (emphasis ours):

Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps.

In short, Apple is saying it knows how to fix the problem but because it’s been burdened by having to comply with the DMA — which it noted had required “more than 600 new APIs and a wide range of developer tools” — it decided to skip fixing this one.

While it may be no small feat to build “an entirely new integration architecture,” it also isn’t as if Apple was surprised by the DMA, a regulation that’s been in the works for years. It had time to prepare for this. To further deflect any culpability here, Apple suggests that people won’t mind that it broke Home Screen web apps, given their “low user adoption.”

But Apple’s own moves contradict that explanation. If anything, Apple has been working to make PWAs more useful over the years, adding features that allowed web apps to function more like native apps, and be easily distributed outside its App Store. Meanwhile, user adoption has been growing, not shrinking. Analysts estimated that the PWA market would reach $10.44 billion by 2027, at a compound annual growth rate of 31.9%.

It’s entirely possible that alternative browser engines could make PWAs even more useful, as Sweeney argues, which would be a threat to Apple’s App Store business, given the web apps are now nearly as functional as native apps are.

Apple had been asked to comment on its decision around PWAs, but it only published an explanation to its DMA website as its response.

Apple confirms it’s breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose

Apple’s answer to EU’s gatekeeper rules is new ‘core tech’ fee for apps

10web screen

Armenia's 10Web brings AI website-building to WordPress

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10web screen

Image Credits: 10web

Generative AI has done an impressive job in improving productivity in a wide range of areas, including website building. There’s no lack of tools that now allow one to generate web designs by simply describing what they want in prompts, including established player Wix and bootstrapped startups like Relume. 10Web, a company based out of Armenia, is entering the race and believes it has an edge.

10Web allows users to quickly generate websites built with WordPress, the widely-used content management system that is notoriously hard to use for beginners, using text prompts. Unlike Wix and Squarespace, WordPress is open-source, meaning many features don’t come out of the box and require more advanced web design skills; it doesn’t come with hosting services either, so users have to manage more backend tasks.

WordPress still powers around 40% of all the websites on the internet, thanks to its customization options, according to estimates by w3techs. Shopify followed in second place amid a boom of direct-to-consumer ecommerce as vendors look to build their online stores with the help of the Canadian company rather than relying on Amazon.

To make WordPress more intuitive to use, 10Web’s Yerevan-based engineering team has integrated generative AI models like Llama 2, GPT-4, and Stable Diffusion into its site-building platform. Such a tool requires a great deal of development effort because “architecturally, building a platform for WordPress is not easy,” said 10Web’s co-founder Arto Minasyan, who also runs Krisp, a startup that removes background noise from audio using machine learning.

“You need to have a very good hosting infrastructure. You need to have a managed service to support WordPress security, backups and uptime. All those things are very, very hard because each of the websites is basically an instance,” he added. “In contrast, if you are building on a closed source solution, let’s say Wix or Squarespace, you just build one backend, and then for each website, you just generate some pages.”

Minasyan is confident that focusing on solving WordPress’s usability will pay off eventually because of the sheer size of its open-source community: two million developers. Founded in 2017, 10Web currently operates with a positive cash flow. Around 20,000 of its users are paying customers (some SMB customers might have several hundred websites, Minasyan noted). Altogether, 1.5 million sites have been generated with 10Web.

10Web has two ways to monetize — charging fees per website or by traffic. It has plans to add a payment system, which will allow users to charge their customers and 10Web to take a cut of the charge as commission fees.

The company is generating $5 million in annual recurring revenue at the moment and is expected to reach $25 million in ARR by the end of next year, Minasyan said. The founder attributed the company’s growth partly to its favorable location in Armenia. Like other former members of the Soviet Union, Armenia enjoys abundant affordable engineering talent.

“We have AI talent, which is probably four times cheaper in Armenia than in the U.S. And here, we can access the best AI talent possible,” the founder suggested. “But if you are a web builder based in California, you gotta compete with Google, Amazon and OpenAI, so it’s not easy to get the best talent.”

Armenia’s budding tech hub in its capital city has spawned the country’s first unicorn, Picsart, which provides a playbook for fellow startups to follow. Given Armenia’s relatively small economy, its entrepreneurs have historically ventured overseas, particularly targeting the U.S. They employ engineers in Armenia to take advantage of the tech talent at home while hiring marketing and business development headcounts in the U.S., a strategy also shared by 10Web’s 70-person strong staff. And of course, having a footprint in the U.S. can be advantageous to fundraising.

“99% of Armenian startups target the U.S. market,” said the founder. “If you want to raise less than $1 million, you can raise from Armenian VCs, but if you want to raise a couple million for seed or tens of millions for Series A, you need to go to the U.S.”

Krisp nearly triples fundraise with $9M expansion after blockbuster 2020

Meta and moderators agree in Kenya to mediation

Meta drops lawsuit against web-scraping firm Bright Data that sold millions of Instagram records

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Meta and moderators agree in Kenya to mediation

Image Credits: Chesnot / Getty Images

Meta has dropped its lawsuit against Israeli web-scraping company Bright Data, after losing a key claim in its case a few weeks ago. The social networking giant has a history of waging war against companies that scrape data from its websites and apps, and Bright Data was among the latest to face a legal attack. However, the court recently ruled in favor of Bright Data on a breach of contract claim, saying that Meta hadn’t presented sufficient evidence that proved the firm had scraped anything other than public data. Rather than continue to fight this case, Meta has now dropped the lawsuit, court filings indicate.

Beyond being just another case of web scraping, what made this case particularly interesting was that Meta was a Bright Data customer at one time. That is, the company had provided Meta with data from e-commerce websites to build brand profiles on its platforms. However, when Bright Data scraped Meta’s own data, the company sued.

The court last month ruled for a partial summary judgment on the breach of contract claims because it said Meta didn’t show enough evidence to indicate that Bright Data had scraped non-public data — meaning data behind a log-in screen or a password-protected page. The case delved into how much user data is being collected by third-party firms like Bright Data, who then sell their data collections to other companies, where they can be used for a variety of purposes, including market research, marketing, ad tech, AI training, and more.

In this case, Meta had brought to the court an example of Bright Data’s web-scraping activities — a massive dataset that included 615 million records of Instagram data that sold for $860,000. The dataset included fields like users’ names, IDs, country, post counts, bios, hashtags, followers, posts, profile images, business categories, emails, and more. But the court didn’t believe Meta showed enough evidence that the data could have only been collected by a logged-in user account.

In another example, Meta attempted to show that Bright Data was in possession of non-public information, but the court said this also couldn’t be used to prove logged-in scraping, as Meta claimed, since the information could have been publicly accessible at an earlier time when the scraping occurred.

The court additionally disagreed with Meta that using automated tools to bypass access restrictions, like CAPTCHAs, was the same as accessing a “password-protected website.”

And even though Meta had found Bright Data advertised a “scraping browser” that automated logging into websites to facilitate logged-in data collection, the court said Meta didn’t have evidence that proved the browser was used in this particular case of scraping Meta’s data.

Finally, the court said there was no evidence that Bright Data used its own Facebook and Instagram accounts for scraping, so it couldn’t be held accountable by Meta’s terms of service and other legal policies users agree to. At the time of the ruling, Meta said it was evaluating the next steps in the ongoing litigation.

On Friday, February 23, 2024, Meta filed to dismiss the remaining claim in its lawsuit against the web-scraping firm (a tortious interference claim), “without prejudice,” and waived its right to appeal the prior order that granted summary judgment in favor of Bright Data on the breach of contract claim.

It’s a rare loss on Meta’s part against the industry of web scrapers, which it regularly litigates against to discourage the practice.

In many other cases, Meta has prevailed, including the October 2022 settlement of a case against two other firms, Israeli-based BrandTotal Ltd. and Delaware-incorporated Unimania Inc., which both agreed to a permanent injunction that banned them from scraping Facebook and Instagram data going forward. Both also had to pay Meta a “significant financial sum,” the tech giant had said. Earlier, Meta settled in 2020 with the scraping service Massroot8. And in 2022, it sued a clone site operator and a company called Octopus, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese national high-tech enterprise that had offered scraping services. Meta won that case as well, and the court issued a permanent injunction to stop the firm’s data-scraping operations.

Last year, Meta sued another scraping-for-hire firm Voyager Labs, but that case is ongoing.

Bright Data says its case was not dismissed because the parties came to a settlement, as it made no agreement with Meta nor will it make any changes to its conduct. In short, the company believes that Meta’s terms do not apply to the scraping of public information while logged out of an account and that this case upholds its right to do so. However, it also indicates that Meta simply needs to provide better evidence of illegal scraping when taking a web scraper to court, beyond just showing it has Meta’s data to sell and runs a business providing data scraping.

“This concession by Meta is a pivotal moment for Bright Data and the web scraping community. We are thrilled with the outcome of this case, solidifying public information is just that public,” said Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data, in an email with TechCrunch. “Bright Data remains committed to keeping public web data freely accessible to everyone. The internet was intended for everyone’s benefit and no single entity or person should claim they own it,” he added.

Meta has been asked for comment but one was not immediately provided.

The company’s lawsuit was case No. is 3:23-cv-00077-EMC and was filed in the U.S. District Court in Northern California.

graphic showing compass on blue background

Apple reverses decision about blocking web apps on iPhones in the EU

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graphic showing compass on blue background

Image Credits: Apple

Apple has reversed its decision about blocking web apps, also known as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), on iPhones in the EU. The company updated its developer page saying that after receiving many requests to support PWAs, it will reinstate the functionality in the upcoming public release of iOS 17.4.

PWAs can act like native apps and access different functionalities of your device without taking up too much space on your phone. These apps can also send you notifications and keep you logged in to a service. As web apps don’t have to be distributed through the App Store, they also don’t have to pay any fees to Apple for in-app purchases or wait for the company’s review process.

Last month, Apple reduced the functionality of PWAs as mere website shortcuts with the release of the second beta of iOS 17.4, as security researcher Tommy Mysk and Open Web Advocacy had first pointed out. The company then updated its developer page saying that because of security risks like malicious web apps reading data from other web apps and accessing cameras, it decided to end support for homescreen apps.

The iPhone maker pointed toward the Digital Markets Act (DMA) compliance as part of the reason for this decision. The act forced Apple to open up the browser ecosystem and not limit developers to only WebKit, allowing them to choose a different engine.

Apple also said that PWAs had “very low user adoption” so there might not be a lot of impact on users. However, the move didn’t sit well with the regulators so they started to investigate the issue by sending questions to developers, as reported by the Financial Times. Separately, the Open Web Advocacy group published an open letter addressed to Tim Cook to lift the ban on web apps, which was signed by hundreds of organizations and individuals, including Mastodon, internet advocate Cory Doctorow and Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.

Apple’s reversal only applies to web apps based on WebKit, as 9to5Mac noted. Users won’t be able to take advantage of this functionality if a browser chooses to use a different engine.

European Commission’s reaction

The European Commission welcomed Apple’s decision and said that after the company first blocked web apps last month, more than 500 citizens, businesses, and public entities submitted their complaints.

“A large number of these stakeholders depend on Home Screen Web Apps to run their business, to communicate with employees and customers and citizens, or to receive crucial information and updates,” an EC spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The EC also added that Apple’s move to block the web apps under the guise of DMA compliance was “neither required, nor justified.”

We understand some web apps that could have been shut down by Apple’s move included apps for public school and hospital scheduling systems and transport companies’ information apps.

Full text of Apple’s update:

Previously, Apple announced plans to remove the Home Screen web apps capability in the EU as part of our efforts to comply with the DMA. The need to remove the capability was informed by the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps to support alternative browser engines that would require building a new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS.

We have received requests to continue to offer support for Home Screen web apps in iOS, therefore we will continue to offer the existing Home Screen web apps capability in the EU. This support means Home Screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS.

Developers and users who may have been impacted by the removal of Home Screen web apps in the beta release of iOS in the EU can expect the return of the existing functionality for Home Screen web apps with the availability of iOS 17.4 in early March.

The story has been updated with the European Commission’s remarks.

Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit

Paddy Cosgrave returns as Web Summit CEO after resigning over Israel/Gaza controversy

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Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit

Image Credits: Web Summit

Paddy Cosgrave, the co-founder of the Web Summit tech conference, is returning to his role as CEO after resigning in October over controversial statements he made about the Israel/Gaza war last year on social media. Rumors of his return began to surface over the weekend; Cosgrave confirmed the move in a post on X today.

Notably, in his announcement, Cosgrave does not make any mention of the politicized remarks he made that led to his departure less than six months ago (with the social media posts he wrote at the time deleted as well, aside from his public apology). Instead, Cosgrave goes for de-escalating, announcing plans for a shift in focus to “smaller” groups.

“As Web Summit becomes bigger, our aim should be to make it smaller for our attendees. More intimate. More convivial. More community focused,” he writes.

In doing so, the move is reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg’s shift to “community” at Facebook in the wake of the social network’s huge post-2016 election scandal (Cambridge Analytica, election manipulation, congressional hearings and the rest).

Smaller groups, of course, give a larger entity — whether it is a social network or an event — a way to cater to different agendas and opinions. As with Facebook, the emphasis on community might be a counterweight to Web Summit’s bigger business aim: scale; in Web Summit’s case, growing its conference empire by getting as many people and companies as possible paying to attend its events.

In a subsequent post on the company’s blog, Web Summit outlined its new focus on targeting smaller communities, likely as a method to extract more value out of its events — both in terms of their ability to attract lucrative sponsorships, but also to make the large, sometimes unwieldy, conferences more valuable to individual attendees: “Over the last year we have tested small prototype meetups for attendees in similar industries like product engineers or marketing leads. All of these were facilitated through our Web Summit app… Our software, our design, our production and all teams and elements of Web Summit will expand to help make this worthwhile mission a reality.”

Web Summit runs a number of very large, global, tech conferences, the best known and biggest of which is in Lisbon, which in recent years attracted upwards of 70,000 attendees. The list also includes smaller, invite-only events under brands including F.ounders for later-stage founders, and other similar events.

Its flagship event went through a tumultuous period last year after it was engulfed in criticism from its large tech sponsors, who pulled out of the Lisbon Web Summit, just weeks out from it taking place, in the wake of Cosgrave’s remarks.

The controversy started when, shortly after October 7, the day of the Hamas massacre of Israeli citizens, Cosgrave posted data on X pertaining to the human cost of the Israel-Palestine conflict between 2008 and 2023, but — inexplicably — omitted any mention of the tragic events (and casualties) of that weekend.

Cosgrave also posted support for the Irish government’s criticism of Israel’s implied plans to cut off water and electricity to Gaza as part of its plans for the war.

(Later, Israel indeed did cut off water and electricity to Gaza, and the country’s government has been accused, by a vote in the UN’s Human Rights Council most recently, of actions that could amount to war crimes.)

 

Cosgrave tweet
Cosgrave tweet

In the face of an outcry, Cosgrave continued to double-down in subsequent posts.

This was the last straw for many of Web Summit’s speakers, with the loudest voices of criticism coming from Israel-based VCs and founders, who were then joined by several influential U.S.-based tech founders and investors.

Large sponsors, including Microsoft and Google, then pulled out of the conference.

Under pressure, Cosgrave apologized for offense caused by the posts and resigned as CEO.

Scrambling in the lead-up to the Lisbon event, Web Summit quickly appointed former Wikimedia CEO Catherine Maher as Cosgrave’s CEO replacement, even as Cosgrave retained an 80% ownership of the business.

It was a very short tenure: Maher left Web Summit a few months later for the CEO role at NPR, leaving Cosgrave’s company rudderless once again, setting the stage for Cosgrave’s return.

Truecaller launches a web client for its Android users

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Truecaller

Truecaller has launched a web version of its eponymous caller ID application that brings a range of features, including SMS and chat mirroring, call notifications, and number search functionality to the desktop. Initially, the web version, called Truecaller for Web, will only be made available to Android users globally, the company said, but it plans to roll out the support on iOS in the future.

All Truecaller for Android users across the world can now link their devices to the web client on a PC or a Mac through a QR code. At the moment, Truecaller is limiting the number of active web sessions to one and is also automatically signing out users after 30 days of no usage. Users can manually de-link a browser from settings as well. This is akin to linking the web version of a messenger like WhatsApp or Telegram.

Truecaller, which counts India as its biggest market with nearly 259 million users, is quite late in offering the SMS and chat-mirroring feature. Notably, Microsoft provides SMS mirroring for both Android and iPhone users on Windows through its Phone Link functionality. Nonetheless, this functionality could provide its users some convenience in quickly replying to a text or accessing one-time passwords (OTPs) for login.

Truecaller also already offers users the ability to look up a phone number on its website, though with some rate limits. Now users will be able to look up numbers without any such limitations on the web client, the company said. The web client also displays real-time caller ID notifications when a user receives a call.

The company said that there are 80 million people who receive SMS pop-up summary notifications every day. This means that these users haven’t denied Truecaller permission to read SMS. But it’s not clear if these folks are using Truecaller as their primary SMS client.

Over the last few months, Truecaller has focused on introducing more AI-powered features. Last month, it launched a “Max” feature update for Android users to block all calls from unapproved contacts or spam detected by AI. In February, the company also brought call recording and AI-powered transcription features to India after launching the feature in the U.S. last year.

After registering lower revenues for the quarter, the company had a 32% stock dip in October 2023. However, the stock has recovered from the low price of SEK24.47 ($2.32) to trading around SEK31.68 ($3) at the time of writing.

After the publication of the story, Truecaller said that it began rolling out the feature globally and not just in India. The story has been reflected to update that.